CA Releases Backup and Recovery Bundle

The bundle integrates continuous application-availability technology from XOsoft, which CA acquired in July, with the vendor's own products. According to CA, it enables a full range of recovery management best practices, including rapid backup to all forms of storage media, replication of data to remote servers and testing of the recoverability of key business applications and channel.

CA, which had released the XOsoft technology as a stand-alone product in October, said it expects the package to do well in the channel because it removes a lot of the pain associated with putting together backup and recovery solutions.

"A big problem in the industry is that customers have all these different point tools to deal with—replication, failover imaging, continuous data protection," Frank Jablonski, director of product marketing for storage management at CA, based in Islandia, N.Y. "It's difficult for the person who has to manage all this stuff. Nothing works together, so they have to manually piece it together."

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CA is marketing the new package as the BrightStor ARCserve Backup/WANSyncHA Bundle, which integrates the XOsoft WAN Sync high-availability and XOsoft Assured Recovery disaster recovery testing solutions with CA's BrightStor ARCserve Backup.

The new bundle makes product delivery and recovery management easier for customers and for channel partners, said Thomas Horne, vice president and chief operating officer at New York-based integrator Computer Integrated Services, which sells and services the technology.

"The integration makes it easy to deliver the product line," Horne said. "It's easy to install and easy to manage."

While CA's Jablonski said stand-alone continuous data protection or CDP has been a tougher sell than other products in the data recovery space, offering it as a complete recovery solution package provides greater value to channel partners and their customers.

Read more here to read about CA's limited-product-set channel marketing strategy.

CDP captures every change made to a system, allowing the system to be rolled back to any point in time rather than only to the daily snapshot typically taken of the enterprise. So if the disaster happens when the workday is nearly complete, an enterprise does not have to lose all that day's work.

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"CDP did not sell well partly because people did not understand what to do with it," Jablonski said. "Now people understand that it is a supporting feature of the backup system and not so much a stand-alone product. … Replication can't be used as a data recovery solution because worms and viruses can be replicated too. But CDP gives you a known good time you can roll back to."

Channel partners can expect to see more bundles from CA, according to the company. "What CA wants to do is tie all these point technologies together for customers," Jablonski said. "This [XOsoft bundle] is the first step in tying them all together."